There was a time it felt like everywhere we turned, someone was telling us to take a look at Amplitude. This was coming not only from our network of Operator LPs at larger enterprises, but also startup founders in our portfolio. Folks were raving both about how Amplitude’s analytics platform provides step-by-step data on the performance of a digital product, as well as how particularly thoughtful and values-driven the Amplitude founders are. When we met co-founder and CEO Spenser Skates, we knew we wanted to be a part of Amplitude’s journey.
The company: Amplitude
Amplitude is the first unified product analytics system that brings together an entirely new depth of customer understanding with the speed of action needed to optimize experiences in the moment. A pioneer in digital optimization, its software enables organizations to see and predict which combination of features and actions translate to business outcomes — and then intelligently adapt each digital experience based on these insights.
Why you should pay attention
In a pandemic world, companies no longer have much of a choice about whether to invest in digital transformation — they need amazing digital products in order to survive. Even before COVID-19, analysts were predicting that companies would deploy over 500 million digital apps by 2023. They’re now expecting 65% of the global economy to be digitized by next year. And the next frontier of digital transformation is digital optimization.
Although the revenue center for most companies is shifting from sales and marketing to product, many of the teams building these products still rely on their intuition to analyze performance. That approach just doesn’t cut it anymore. In order to keep up with the pace of disruption in our more digital-than-ever landscape, product teams require a fundamentally new approach. They need 360-degree insight into the entire digital experience. Only then can they make data-driven bets that transform customer value. Enter Amplitude’s digital optimization system.
The details
Amplitude has changed the game for more than 1,200 organizations, including B2B software brands such as Atlassian, Intuit, and Hubspot, as well as consumer brands like Twitter, Walmart, Instacart, and Spirit Airlines (along with 26 of the Fortune 100). Its digital optimization system is the “Moneyball” brains behind 45,000+ digital products. Amplitude’s software helps these teams innovate faster and smarter by giving them fine-grained performance data that goes way deeper than the basic ad clicks and page views of previous decades.
It shows them exactly how specific combinations of features and user actions translate to customer retention, loyalty, lifetime value, and other business outcomes. With this data, they can make strategic decisions — like whether to launch a big feature or change a distribution channel. They can experiment, see what’s working and what isn’t, and make changes to their product based on real-time behavior.
How it works
Amplitude’s platform tracks 900 billion customer behaviors each month in a privacy-conscious way. It aggregates all this data and uses machine learning to segment users, predict outcomes, and uncover relevant patterns throughout the digital journey. For example, Amplitude’s product analytics help teams find ways to quickly reduce friction and double-down on features that increase revenue. Earlier this year, the company also launched new solutions to help product and marketing teams easily personalize digital touchpoints and test experiences with key segments.
All of these solutions are powered by Amplitude’s proprietary behavioral graph, which was invented by company founder and chief architect, Jeffrey Wang. Built for the complexity of modern digital products, its native query engine and machine learning algorithms correlate every individual action taken across a digital product to understand and predict which behaviors are indicators of certain outcomes.
Amplitude’s origin
Amplitude was founded in 2012 by former MIT alums (and Battlecode competition opponents) Curtis Liu and Spenser Skates, along with Stanford grad Jeffrey Wang. Curtis and Spenser had actually taken a stab at another startup (a voice recognition app called Sonalight) before that but decided it was a little too early for its time. However, they realized the product analytics tool they had built to better understand how customers were using Sonalight could actually be more valuable. Clearly, they were right about that, and Amplitude has been a rocketship ever since, culminating in a successful direct listing last month.
Get involved
To find out more about Amplitude’s digital optimization system, explore its product demo or customer stories. And while you’re there, it’s worth a look at the company’s many career opportunities.
